Claims and Teachings - Ahmad The Promised Messiah and Mahdi — Page 144
144 who created nothing and consider matter and soul as co-eternal with God and self-existent like Him. . But all these trusts are vain, for they have no argument with them. To find his way to the living God should be the sole object of the seeker after truth. The world is constrained in the bondage of customs and habits. Every one who is born in a religion deems it his duty to defend the same. But it can be easily seen that this principle is wrong. A man should adopt the religion which can point out the way to the living God whom extraordinary signs and miracles point out with certainty as the powerful and mighty God. For if God exists (and I swear by Him that His existence is the greatest of all certainties), then He must reveal Himself to His servants. The mere guesses of human reason that this world has a Creator are not sufficient to give satisfaction and make His existence a cer- tainty. The man who trusts in these conjectures has no access to the Divine presence, and he cannot rely upon God with as great a certainty as he counts upon the cash which is locked up in his safe, or upon land and gardens which are the source of income to him, or upon sons on high posts who assist their father by sending in large donations of money every month. Why does he not trust upon God as he trusts upon all these material objects? Only because his faith in God is not a certain faith. Similarly a man who is negligent of his duty to the Divine Being, in bold in the commission of sin and does not fear God as he fears the plague, for instance, not going into a village where its devastating hand is busy at work, or as he fears the snake not daring to thrust his hand into its hole, or as he fears the lion not having the courage to go into a jungle which is its abode. The reason at the bottom of this boldness in the commission of sin is the same unbelief in God, for while admitting God with the tongue, the heart is quite foreign to Him and negligent of Him. It is not easy to have a